We Need Net Neutrality!

I came across this article while cleaning up my inbox post-surgery and came across this article titled Google Wants Its Own Fast Track on the Web.

There's good reason for having net neutrality. We don't want to be slowed down to a crawl. How fast this crawl would be could be dependent on the provider. We do not want landline modem speeds (14.4K to 56K) while major companies with deep pockets get the higher speeds.

For example, a T-1 line is 1.5 mbps, OC1 is 51.85mbps, and OC24 is 1.244gbps. One DSL line is about the speed of a T1 line. A normal NIC card can do upwards of 100mbps, while a gigabit card, essentially a fiber optic line, may be the equivalent of an OC24 line. I may be a bit off on these figures, though.

Putting this in perspective... A CD can hold 700 megs. Downloading this on a 56K line would take 2-3 days. On a normal cable line, it can be 20-30 minutes. On an OC line, about several minutes. All this depends on line conditions.

Obama said "Once providers start to give privilege to some Web sites and applications over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and then we all lose." Check this...

Obama's Broadband Plan

A president that understands the internet! We need that. He's absolutely right. This essentially means that any small website may never get the chance to show itself off, especially when it starts selling items and/or add advertisements. This means that only the major companies will be the winners, possibly locking out the smaller users. This can also affect how well our VPs can be used. Too slow a speed, and you'll get the equivalent of a slideshow or unusable video.

We don't want that, do we?